Facilities management at DU, which is in charge of maintaining the campus and keeping it clean, blames student apathy for the absence of a viable recycling program, according to the head of facilities management.
Recycling has been dormant since the collapse of the student-operated recycling system that operated recycling for the past 12 years.
Now, facilities management and other campus administrators are seeking reform–if students are also committed.
“Administration gave the green light,” said Jeff Bemelen, head of facilities management. “But we can only support it [recycling]to the extent the students support it.”
Bemelen said the attitude of students and faculty has changed from indifferent to insistence.
“We are currently only doing 20 to 30 percent of what we should be doing with recycling” said Bemelen, who agrees that there is now an unmistakable community-wide push to go green that was not as noticeable three years ago.
Bemelen described the entirely student-run recycling program of 1995, where work-study students were solely in charge of collecting and separating recyclables, preparing them for pick up by a contractor. This system came to a complete halt during the six week winter interterm.
Recycling bins outside campus buildings overflowed with materials that were both recyclable and not. This posed another flaw in the recycling system; students were not using recycling receptacles properly. They used them instead as garbage cans.
While facilities lost the manpower to continue to pick up and sort through the garbage, recycling bins on campus gradually became rare. Administration made the executive decision to remove recycling bins from outdoor areas, and instead moved recycling efforts to inside office buildings and some educational buildings. Efforts to recycle paper products, plastics, printer cartridges, aluminum and cardboard are then hidden, in a sense, from campus community awareness.
The student environmental organization, DUET is an avid supporter of student recycling. Creating a petition greeted with overwhelming support, the organizers have documented evidence that students at DU claim to care about recycling. However, Bemelen said the heaping garbage cans outside Sturm Hall, and the vacant recycling bins in Jazz Man’s cafCB) show otherwise.
“If someone is conscientious enough about recycling, they will walk the extra 30 yards to recycle it inside a building,” said Bemelen.
Bemelen was recently contacted by the staff in the Mary Reed Building to set up a meeting to design a recycling system to serve as a prototype for recycling in other buildings on campus. The meeting is to be set for later this week, and ideally, the plan will be launched this year. This plan will establish a regular recycling pick-up schedule, and allow for a longer list of recyclable materials. Should the plan be implemented campus wide, it is up to students to take responsibility for its sustainability, said Bemelen.
